What a shock . Looks like some of the Brazilian footballers who supported Bolsonaro have reaped the karma they deserved . Neymar in particular who was full on the Trump of South America .
Although some others were notable opponents of his. Richarlison for one.
I’m sorry for those . I generally like Brazil but have little time for Neymar.
HOWEVER, he is NOT a 24/7 disaster zone like his predecessor(s). His value is limited, but more than nil.
Whereas BJ was big fat zero, certainly that was the average: up a mountain at the start, down a hole at the end.
And LT was less than zero, from Budget Soup to Fracking Nuts.
If natural gas in the US was anywhere near the price it is in the UK, you might be a little less disparaging of 'Fracking Nuts.' I am reminded of Biden's deeply hypocritical (not to mention diplomatically disgraceful) intervention in criticising Truss's cutting the top rate of income tax, when its proposed rate was still a lot higher than the top rate in the US.
What I was disparaging, was the moronic vote on fracking in HoC, that was the final nail in the open coffin of the Liz Truss premiership.
Wanna defend THAT?
BTW, Biden and US government, and USA as whole, have direct stake in Trussterfuck due to implications for global economy AND the potential for IMF bailout or something like it.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It astounds me that so many are reluctant to recognise that we were getting closer and closer to insolvency whilst our standard of living declined in the SM. That was mainly our own fault but the idea that continuing on the same course was either viable or sane really is delusional. I completely accept that the necessary changes could have been done within the EU but disruption and poor relative performance was inevitable.
The idea that Britain’s “standard of living declined in the SM” is…
…unique.
We were living well beyond our means with a standard of living we were not earning and falling into debt. Those are the facts. We went from having a significant surplus on foreign investment to an almost unsustainable deficit because so many assets were sold to cover the deficits. If you think that was success you really are delusional.
The single market is not responsible for Britain living beyond its means. That was successive governments, many of which you voted for.
You have, I will say again, a frankly unique understanding of trade economics.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It was a big economy. Slightly smaller nowadays, relatively speaking.
As for the balance of trade, the sort of argument you are implying died out about two hundred years ago.
The entrepôt was not everything, but it paid for much of the rest of the stuff. Just one example, Hunt had to pay for the budget by kicking out social care funding until after the next election, which his government is very likely to lose.
Well, absolutely. Brexit means we can no longer afford the things we used to. That’s true for government and consumers.
Some will say it is worth it for the extra sovereignty.
Talk of the balance of payments/trade may not be the toast of pubs, but the concept is still as vital as it ever was.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It was a big economy. Slightly smaller nowadays, relatively speaking.
As for the balance of trade, the sort of argument you are implying died out about two hundred years ago.
The entrepôt was not everything, but it paid for much of the rest of the stuff. Just one example, Hunt had to pay for the budget by kicking out social care funding until after the next election, which his government is very likely to lose.
Well, absolutely. Brexit means we can no longer afford the things we used to. That’s true for government and consumers.
Some will say it is worth it for the extra sovereignty.
Talk of the balance of payments/trade may not be the toast of pubs, but the concept is still as vital as it ever was.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
On the other hand - I've seen some teachers do "This is the exam question and this is the answer the student gave. Would you grade it for me?" and 10 seconds later it's done, along with the justification and notes.
Croatia defended and did nothing until they were behind. Their goal was their only shot on target in 120 minutes. That type of negativity is not good for football.
The game is the game. If you’re ahead at the end you win.
Brazil’s problem is that they weren’t very good tonight. If they’d been at their best, Croatian negativity would have meant nothing.
That Neymar goal deserved to be a winner though. But, you know, it wasn't.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
AI/VR is fascinating but how does it map to the big global issues? It's easy in our gilded bubble to forget what these are. So a reminder of the top 5:
Abject poverty Oppression of women Political repression Pollution War
If it doesn't help eradicate these things it's no gamechanger imo.
Category error
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
HOWEVER, he is NOT a 24/7 disaster zone like his predecessor(s). His value is limited, but more than nil.
Whereas BJ was big fat zero, certainly that was the average: up a mountain at the start, down a hole at the end.
And LT was less than zero, from Budget Soup to Fracking Nuts.
If natural gas in the US was anywhere near the price it is in the UK, you might be a little less disparaging of 'Fracking Nuts.' I am reminded of Biden's deeply hypocritical (not to mention diplomatically disgraceful) intervention in criticising Truss's cutting the top rate of income tax, when its proposed rate was still a lot higher than the top rate in the US.
What I was disparaging, was the moronic vote on fracking in HoC, that was the final nail in the open coffin of the Liz Truss premiership.
Wanna defend THAT?
BTW, Biden and US government, and USA as whole, have direct stake in Trussterfuck due to implications for global economy AND the potential for IMF bailout or something like it.
Well, whilst we're talking about having a stake, perhaps Truss should have come on to the airwaves bumping her gums about how the US post-covid stimulus package had ignited worldwide inflation before the Ukraine war was even a thing, or how catastrophic the aggressive interest rate rises the Fed was putting in place have been for markets around the world. America's actions, military and civilian, have far more impact on the world than any that Britain might be considering, but thankfully everyone else displays a little more diplomatic restraint when dealing with the fallout.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
AI/VR is fascinating but how does it map to the big global issues? It's easy in our gilded bubble to forget what these are. So a reminder of the top 5:
Abject poverty Oppression of women Political repression Pollution War
If it doesn't help eradicate these things it's no gamechanger imo.
Category error
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
Pollution was a serious problem in Victorian times.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It was a big economy. Slightly smaller nowadays, relatively speaking.
As for the balance of trade, the sort of argument you are implying died out about two hundred years ago.
The entrepôt was not everything, but it paid for much of the rest of the stuff. Just one example, Hunt had to pay for the budget by kicking out social care funding until after the next election, which his government is very likely to lose.
Well, absolutely. Brexit means we can no longer afford the things we used to. That’s true for government and consumers.
Some will say it is worth it for the extra sovereignty.
Talk of the balance of payments/trade may not be the toast of pubs, but the concept is still as vital as it ever was.
What does vital mean here?
Standard dictionary definition. If a nation spends more than it earns on a consistent basis, it is heading for bankruptcy whether there is lots of 'trade' going on or not. Indeed the volume of trade, if it is uneven, merely hastens the process.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
AI/VR is fascinating but how does it map to the big global issues? It's easy in our gilded bubble to forget what these are. So a reminder of the top 5:
Abject poverty Oppression of women Political repression Pollution War
If it doesn't help eradicate these things it's no gamechanger imo.
Category error
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
Pollution was a serious problem in Victorian times.
True enough, I meant more as a global issue endangering mankind - ie climate change - that wasn't the case back then
That said, and on reflection, climate change might be the one case where AI will obviously help. A megabrain will think of solutions mere humans cannot
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
Global services trade, backed up by the presence of as many high skilled people we can import and a friendly regulatory environment. Then restrict low skilled workers to push up wages at the bottom.
At the highest level, that *was* the model. Migration was always higher skilled than the native population.
Not overall surely? The bulk seemed to be people willing to do low paid jobs that the locals wouldn’t, such as care work, hospitality and picking crops. And a tiny minority of high skilled people in Unis and the city.
Yes, overall. Well attested. As for “tiny minority”, that doesn’t really describe the key London service industries like tech etc.
I would think that migration from the EU is higher-skilled than the native population now. In fact, the difference will have increased, if it was higher before (which I doubt).
Just before the pandemic I visited one of Facebook's London offices: about a third of their new hires were from the EU (about a third UK, the remainder others: many Indian). So skilled immigration from the EU continues apace.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
On the other hand - I've seen some teachers do "This is the exam question and this is the answer the student gave. Would you grade it for me?" and 10 seconds later it's done, along with the justification and notes.
Swings and roundabouts.
So we will end up with essays written by computers being graded by computers, meanwhile the humans will sit at the side mutely scrolling TikTok on their phones. Probably looking at videos made by computers
It is a dystopian vison, it will probably come true, and it is sad for anyone in education
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It was a big economy. Slightly smaller nowadays, relatively speaking.
As for the balance of trade, the sort of argument you are implying died out about two hundred years ago.
The entrepôt was not everything, but it paid for much of the rest of the stuff. Just one example, Hunt had to pay for the budget by kicking out social care funding until after the next election, which his government is very likely to lose.
Well, absolutely. Brexit means we can no longer afford the things we used to. That’s true for government and consumers.
Some will say it is worth it for the extra sovereignty.
Talk of the balance of payments/trade may not be the toast of pubs, but the concept is still as vital as it ever was.
What does vital mean here?
Standard dictionary definition. If a nation spends more than it earns on a consistent basis, it is heading for bankruptcy whether there is lots of 'trade' going on or not. Indeed the volume of trade, if it is uneven, merely hastens the process.
No, it’s not headed for bankruptcy.
You have a static model in your head, in which a fixed slice of pie gets traded around the world.
You miss the effects of endogenous innovation and wealth creation. In other words, Britain keeps making new pies and indeed new types of pie.
I happen to agree that Britain’s goods deficit was too large, but my main issue is/was that it reflected a lack of productivity in the traditional manufacturing regions.
Finally, Britain’s trade deficit seems to have increased significantly since leaving the single market.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
Global services trade, backed up by the presence of as many high skilled people we can import and a friendly regulatory environment. Then restrict low skilled workers to push up wages at the bottom.
At the highest level, that *was* the model. Migration was always higher skilled than the native population.
Not overall surely? The bulk seemed to be people willing to do low paid jobs that the locals wouldn’t, such as care work, hospitality and picking crops. And a tiny minority of high skilled people in Unis and the city.
Yes, overall. Well attested. As for “tiny minority”, that doesn’t really describe the key London service industries like tech etc.
I would think that migration from the EU is higher-skilled than the native population now. In fact, the difference will have increased, if it was higher before (which I doubt).
Just before the pandemic I visited one of Facebook's London offices: about a third of their new hires were from the EU (about a third UK, the remainder others: many Indian). So skilled immigration from the EU continues apace.
There’s no reason to doubt it, it’s an uncontested fact. Possibly, yes, the delta has increased further since Brexit.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
On the other hand - I've seen some teachers do "This is the exam question and this is the answer the student gave. Would you grade it for me?" and 10 seconds later it's done, along with the justification and notes.
Swings and roundabouts.
Go back to spoken discourse, oral defence of thesis for PhDs etc. This will work for the 10 years between now, and everyone having a chatbot implant in their heads
If she meant this stuff she'd be verging on the psychotic. Perhaps she does mean it. Or perhaps she is such a politician that the difference between meaning something and not meaning it doesn't apply. But surely she has heard of slavery, concentration camps, dropping atom bombs, things like that?
Plans for the £1.3bn Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon have been dealt a blow by the Court of Appeal, which has ruled that work on the project did not commence within five years of receiving planning approval and therefore the development consent order (DCO) is no longer valid.
Official ChatGPT is a development on par with the printing press, electricity and even the wheel and fire, says former US Treasury Secretary @LHSummers
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It was a big economy. Slightly smaller nowadays, relatively speaking.
As for the balance of trade, the sort of argument you are implying died out about two hundred years ago.
The entrepôt was not everything, but it paid for much of the rest of the stuff. Just one example, Hunt had to pay for the budget by kicking out social care funding until after the next election, which his government is very likely to lose.
Well, absolutely. Brexit means we can no longer afford the things we used to. That’s true for government and consumers.
Some will say it is worth it for the extra sovereignty.
Talk of the balance of payments/trade may not be the toast of pubs, but the concept is still as vital as it ever was.
What does vital mean here?
Standard dictionary definition. If a nation spends more than it earns on a consistent basis, it is heading for bankruptcy whether there is lots of 'trade' going on or not. Indeed the volume of trade, if it is uneven, merely hastens the process.
No, it’s not headed for bankruptcy.
You have a static model in your head, in which a fixed slice of pie gets traded around the world.
You miss the effects of endogenous innovation and wealth creation. In other words, Britain keeps making new pies and indeed new types of pie.
I happen to agree that Britain’s goods deficit was too large, but my main issue is/was that it reflected a lack of productivity in the traditional manufacturing regions.
Finally, Britain’s trade deficit seems to have increased significantly since leaving the single market.
On your last point, it looks more volatile, but I wouldn't describe this as having increased significantly:
If she meant this stuff she'd be verging on the psychotic. Perhaps she does mean it. Or perhaps she is such a politician that the difference between meaning something and not meaning it doesn't apply. But surely she has heard of slavery, concentration camps, dropping atom bombs, things like that?
Does she know of the other, more strategic, uses of coal?
If she meant this stuff she'd be verging on the psychotic. Perhaps she does mean it. Or perhaps she is such a politician that the difference between meaning something and not meaning it doesn't apply. But surely she has heard of slavery, concentration camps, dropping atom bombs, things like that?
It's also curious that she says crime "against humanity". If she had said - like any environmentalist should - that it is a crime against the planet she would be making more sense and acting like an actual - you know - green party representative.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
AI/VR is fascinating but how does it map to the big global issues? It's easy in our gilded bubble to forget what these are. So a reminder of the top 5:
Abject poverty Oppression of women Political repression Pollution War
If it doesn't help eradicate these things it's no gamechanger imo.
Category error
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
Fair cop. Where 'narrow' = elevated and startlingly original.
But seriously, all joshing aside, in this case I'm doing Applied rather than Pure. Both of these MOs are necessary in order to harness revolutionary tech for the greater good.
And re "how did electricity impact on things like poverty and female emancipation?"
No, the question doesn't seem 'silly' phrased like that. Quite the opposite. It looks all the more interesting. I'd welcome your views after you've given it some thought.
Please tag me - I'll check in later and take a look.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
AI/VR is fascinating but how does it map to the big global issues? It's easy in our gilded bubble to forget what these are. So a reminder of the top 5:
Abject poverty Oppression of women Political repression Pollution War
If it doesn't help eradicate these things it's no gamechanger imo.
Category error
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
Pollution was a serious problem in Victorian times.
True enough, I meant more as a global issue endangering mankind - ie climate change - that wasn't the case back then
That said, and on reflection, climate change might be the one case where AI will obviously help. A megabrain will think of solutions mere humans cannot
Can Mr Smegabrain put his favourite solution on half a sheet of A4 if he doesn't mind. Then I'll decide whether or not to implement it.
Now that really would be a category error. Those who control the questions control the answers, or they control the acceptable field in which answers can be given.
The climate has always changed. Wanting to stop it changing is Frankensteinian. The mobilisation fits extremely well in the fascist dynamic that's well underway now, and picking up pace, in all countries.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It astounds me that so many are reluctant to recognise that we were getting closer and closer to insolvency whilst our standard of living declined in the SM. That was mainly our own fault but the idea that continuing on the same course was either viable or sane really is delusional. I completely accept that the necessary changes could have been done within the EU but disruption and poor relative performance was inevitable.
The idea that Britain’s “standard of living declined in the SM” is…
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
AI/VR is fascinating but how does it map to the big global issues? It's easy in our gilded bubble to forget what these are. So a reminder of the top 5:
Abject poverty Oppression of women Political repression Pollution War
If it doesn't help eradicate these things it's no gamechanger imo.
Category error
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
Fair cop. Where 'narrow' = elevated and startlingly original.
But seriously, all joshing aside, in this case I'm doing Applied rather than Pure. Both of these MOs are necessary in order to harness revolutionary tech for the greater good.
And re "how did electricity impact on things like poverty and female emancipation?"
No, the question doesn't seem 'silly' phrased like that. Quite the opposite. It looks all the more interesting. I'd welcome your views after you've given it some thought.
Please tag me - I'll check in later and take a look.
Electricity freed women from substantial amounts of domestic drudgery, creating the space to pursue careers outside the home in a modern industrial economy.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It astounds me that so many are reluctant to recognise that we were getting closer and closer to insolvency whilst our standard of living declined in the SM. That was mainly our own fault but the idea that continuing on the same course was either viable or sane really is delusional. I completely accept that the necessary changes could have been done within the EU but disruption and poor relative performance was inevitable.
The idea that Britain’s “standard of living declined in the SM” is…
…unique.
We were living well beyond our means with a standard of living we were not earning and falling into debt. Those are the facts. We went from having a significant surplus on foreign investment to an almost unsustainable deficit because so many assets were sold to cover the deficits. If you think that was success you really are delusional.
We are a lot worse now than we ever were in the EU David.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
Not sure 'Don't lie for years' is one of those lessons you can learn. If you did it for so long, you'll do it again when you can get away with it. A hospital trust has apologised to a woman for failing to admit a surgeon had been responsible for a massive haemorrhage that almost killed her after a Caesarean section.
For seven years, East Kent Hospitals Trust maintained the size of Louise Dempster's baby was to blame.
"It was just continuous lies," the 34-year-old told BBC News.
East Kent Hospitals chief executive Tracy Fletcher promised "to ensure lessons are learned".
HOWEVER, he is NOT a 24/7 disaster zone like his predecessor(s). His value is limited, but more than nil.
Whereas BJ was big fat zero, certainly that was the average: up a mountain at the start, down a hole at the end.
And LT was less than zero, from Budget Soup to Fracking Nuts.
If natural gas in the US was anywhere near the price it is in the UK, you might be a little less disparaging of 'Fracking Nuts.' I am reminded of Biden's deeply hypocritical (not to mention diplomatically disgraceful) intervention in criticising Truss's cutting the top rate of income tax, when its proposed rate was still a lot higher than the top rate in the US.
What I was disparaging, was the moronic vote on fracking in HoC, that was the final nail in the open coffin of the Liz Truss premiership.
Wanna defend THAT?
BTW, Biden and US government, and USA as whole, have direct stake in Trussterfuck due to implications for global economy AND the potential for IMF bailout or something like it.
Well, whilst we're talking about having a stake, perhaps Truss should have come on to the airwaves bumping her gums about how the US post-covid stimulus package had ignited worldwide inflation before the Ukraine war was even a thing, or how catastrophic the aggressive interest rate rises the Fed was putting in place have been for markets around the world. America's actions, military and civilian, have far more impact on the world than any that Britain might be considering, but thankfully everyone else displays a little more diplomatic restraint when dealing with the fallout.
Liz Truss is free to say whatever she wants about anything she wants.
Though doubt is anyone gives a blind fiddler's final farewell feck about ANYTHING she's got to say. Except maybe forTMZ coverage of her memoirs!
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
If they're in the formal so-called "education" system, they may have heard of services such as Turnitin and Ithenticate.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
On the other hand - I've seen some teachers do "This is the exam question and this is the answer the student gave. Would you grade it for me?" and 10 seconds later it's done, along with the justification and notes.
Swings and roundabouts.
So we will end up with essays written by computers being graded by computers, meanwhile the humans will sit at the side mutely scrolling TikTok on their phones. Probably looking at videos made by computers
It is a dystopian vison, it will probably come true, and it is sad for anyone in education
The feedback loop is an interesting aspect. I know some lecturers who have in the region of 200-400 students in a class and they really get a very cursory exam/coursework check as it is. If students send in marked coursework that has been pre-graded as an 'A' by an AI, then the lecturer uses an AI to check it - will it get better marks than a new, original solution?
Sadly, in 'the real world' a new original solution might also get marked down by a real lecturer skimming it, so maybe it doesn't make a huge difference.
Possibly we are really heading for a 'The Machine Stops' situation down the road. Or, as I've previously referenced 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'. In a dystopian scenario - if we're lucky we will be the Eloi to benevolent AI Morlocks. if we're not then... well. Damn.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
AI/VR is fascinating but how does it map to the big global issues? It's easy in our gilded bubble to forget what these are. So a reminder of the top 5:
Abject poverty Oppression of women Political repression Pollution War
If it doesn't help eradicate these things it's no gamechanger imo.
Category error
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
Pollution was a serious problem in Victorian times.
True enough, I meant more as a global issue endangering mankind - ie climate change - that wasn't the case back then
That said, and on reflection, climate change might be the one case where AI will obviously help. A megabrain will think of solutions mere humans cannot
Can Mr Smegabrain put his favourite solution on half a sheet of A4 if he doesn't mind. Then I'll decide whether or not to implement it.
Now that really would be a category error. Those who control the questions control the answers, or they control the acceptable field in which answers can be given.
The climate has always changed. Wanting to stop it changing is Frankensteinian. The mobilisation fits extremely well in the fascist dynamic that's well underway now, and picking up pace, in all countries.
This is bonkers. Yes ok the climate has always changed, but the larger changes have always led to mass extinctions. So a species which uniquely has, just possibly, to alter a possible extinction event in its own favour should not be put off by That's just the way it's always been type arguments.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
You mean they have a life
Perhaps, but in a year or two they might not have a job
Not sure 'Don't lie for years' is one of those lessons you can learn. If you did it for so long, you'll do it again when you can get away with it. A hospital trust has apologised to a woman for failing to admit a surgeon had been responsible for a massive haemorrhage that almost killed her after a Caesarean section.
For seven years, East Kent Hospitals Trust maintained the size of Louise Dempster's baby was to blame.
"It was just continuous lies," the 34-year-old told BBC News.
East Kent Hospitals chief executive Tracy Fletcher promised "to ensure lessons are learned".
A relative, when his wife went in for an emergency c-section, physically prevented her from being wheeled out of the operating theatre. Because her blood pressure was dropping, continuously.
After a bit of a frank discussion, they had another go and found the claret leak.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
If they're in the formal so-called "education" system, they may have heard of services such as Turnitin and Ithenticate.
Or just give low marks to drivel.
Those seem to be plagiarism detectors. Why would they work on original material?
One or two on the Conservative side getting excited about a couple of polls but it's not that simple.
Savanta ComRes is arguably the best poll for the Conservatives for some time with just an 11-point Labour lead (42-31) - the fieldwork was done 2-4 December so perhaps a little out of date. The headline figure is all those likely to vote and expressing a party preference.
Among the sub-samples, the 65+ age group has a 47-26 Conservative lead - England has Labour ahead 45-34 (a 12% swing Con-Lab) while London has a 54-31 Labour lead.
In the other corners, Techne has Labour 48%, Conservative 27%. In their sub-samples, Labour leads 45-34 among those 65 or over. 22% of those who voted Conservative would now vote Labour. Sampling on Wednesday.
Finally, we have People Polling who have Labour on 47%, Conservatives on 20% - unfortunately, no data tables I can see. Sampling Wednesday and yesterday.
There you are, Labour 42-48%, Conservatives 20-31%. That's an enormous variation and while all polling is wrong, some of this is very wrong indeed. As so often with life, something for everyone and more polls are needed...
Even yesterday's local by-elections the veritable curate's egg. I'm not sure a Conservative gain in South Holland & The Deepings (where John Hayes clings on by his fingertips and a 31,000 majority) means much though the win in Dumfries & Galloway of more significance. Gains also for Labour and the LDs in areas of present and former strength.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It was a big economy. Slightly smaller nowadays, relatively speaking.
As for the balance of trade, the sort of argument you are implying died out about two hundred years ago.
The entrepôt was not everything, but it paid for much of the rest of the stuff. Just one example, Hunt had to pay for the budget by kicking out social care funding until after the next election, which his government is very likely to lose.
Well, absolutely. Brexit means we can no longer afford the things we used to. That’s true for government and consumers.
Some will say it is worth it for the extra sovereignty.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
Global services trade, backed up by the presence of as many high skilled people we can import and a friendly regulatory environment. Then restrict low skilled workers to push up wages at the bottom.
At the highest level, that *was* the model. Migration was always higher skilled than the native population.
Not overall surely? The bulk seemed to be people willing to do low paid jobs that the locals wouldn’t, such as care work, hospitality and picking crops. And a tiny minority of high skilled people in Unis and the city.
Yes, overall. Well attested. As for “tiny minority”, that doesn’t really describe the key London service industries like tech etc.
I would think that migration from the EU is higher-skilled than the native population now. In fact, the difference will have increased, if it was higher before (which I doubt).
Just before the pandemic I visited one of Facebook's London offices: about a third of their new hires were from the EU (about a third UK, the remainder others: many Indian). So skilled immigration from the EU continues apace.
There’s no reason to doubt it, it’s an uncontested fact. Possibly, yes, the delta has increased further since Brexit.
I hate to be the "can I have a source" dude, but can I have a source?
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
Global services trade, backed up by the presence of as many high skilled people we can import and a friendly regulatory environment. Then restrict low skilled workers to push up wages at the bottom.
At the highest level, that *was* the model. Migration was always higher skilled than the native population.
Not overall surely? The bulk seemed to be people willing to do low paid jobs that the locals wouldn’t, such as care work, hospitality and picking crops. And a tiny minority of high skilled people in Unis and the city.
Yes, overall. Well attested. As for “tiny minority”, that doesn’t really describe the key London service industries like tech etc.
I would think that migration from the EU is higher-skilled than the native population now. In fact, the difference will have increased, if it was higher before (which I doubt).
Just before the pandemic I visited one of Facebook's London offices: about a third of their new hires were from the EU (about a third UK, the remainder others: many Indian). So skilled immigration from the EU continues apace.
There’s no reason to doubt it, it’s an uncontested fact. Possibly, yes, the delta has increased further since Brexit.
I hate to be the "can I have a source" dude, but can I have a source?
As the minor German Bank I work for, they have nearly given up trying to get IT staff in Germany. They are hiring for IT in London, instead.
EDIT: I am the only person in my team with UK passport. No Germans, but pretty much everywhere else.
One or two on the Conservative side getting excited about a couple of polls but it's not that simple.
Savanta ComRes is arguably the best poll for the Conservatives for some time with just an 11-point Labour lead (42-31) - the fieldwork was done 2-4 December so perhaps a little out of date. The headline figure is all those likely to vote and expressing a party preference.
Among the sub-samples, the 65+ age group has a 47-26 Conservative lead - England has Labour ahead 45-34 (a 12% swing Con-Lab) while London has a 54-31 Labour lead.
In the other corners, Techne has Labour 48%, Conservative 27%. In their sub-samples, Labour leads 45-34 among those 65 or over. 22% of those who voted Conservative would now vote Labour. Sampling on Wednesday.
Finally, we have People Polling who have Labour on 47%, Conservatives on 20% - unfortunately, no data tables I can see. Sampling Wednesday and yesterday.
There you are, Labour 42-48%, Conservatives 20-31%. That's an enormous variation and while all polling is wrong, some of this is very wrong indeed. As so often with life, something for everyone and more polls are needed...
Even yesterday's local by-elections the veritable curate's egg. I'm not sure a Conservative gain in South Holland & The Deepings (where John Hayes clings on by his fingertips and a 31,000 majority) means much though the win in Dumfries & Galloway of more significance. Gains also for Labour and the LDs in areas of present and former strength.
I'm more interested in VI polling from pollsters with a track record. Sadly at the moment these are mostly being crowded out by the newcomers. Even YouGov seems to be polling much less frequently than usual.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
On the other hand - I've seen some teachers do "This is the exam question and this is the answer the student gave. Would you grade it for me?" and 10 seconds later it's done, along with the justification and notes.
Swings and roundabouts.
So we will end up with essays written by computers being graded by computers, meanwhile the humans will sit at the side mutely scrolling TikTok on their phones. Probably looking at videos made by computers
It is a dystopian vison, it will probably come true, and it is sad for anyone in education
The feedback loop is an interesting aspect. I know some lecturers who have in the region of 200-400 students in a class and they really get a very cursory exam/coursework check as it is. If students send in marked coursework that has been pre-graded as an 'A' by an AI, then the lecturer uses an AI to check it - will it get better marks than a new, original solution?
Sadly, in 'the real world' a new original solution might also get marked down by a real lecturer skimming it, so maybe it doesn't make a huge difference.
Possibly we are really heading for a 'The Machine Stops' situation down the road. Or, as I've previously referenced 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'. In a dystopian scenario - if we're lucky we will be the Eloi to benevolent AI Morlocks. if we're not then... well. Damn.
It really isn't a great film, and the only fun to be had was Forbin/Corbyn.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
Global services trade, backed up by the presence of as many high skilled people we can import and a friendly regulatory environment. Then restrict low skilled workers to push up wages at the bottom.
At the highest level, that *was* the model. Migration was always higher skilled than the native population.
Not overall surely? The bulk seemed to be people willing to do low paid jobs that the locals wouldn’t, such as care work, hospitality and picking crops. And a tiny minority of high skilled people in Unis and the city.
Yes, overall. Well attested. As for “tiny minority”, that doesn’t really describe the key London service industries like tech etc.
I would think that migration from the EU is higher-skilled than the native population now. In fact, the difference will have increased, if it was higher before (which I doubt).
Just before the pandemic I visited one of Facebook's London offices: about a third of their new hires were from the EU (about a third UK, the remainder others: many Indian). So skilled immigration from the EU continues apace.
There’s no reason to doubt it, it’s an uncontested fact. Possibly, yes, the delta has increased further since Brexit.
I hate to be the "can I have a source" dude, but can I have a source?
As the minor German Bank I work for, they have nearly given up trying to get IT staff in Germany. They are hiring for IT in London, instead.
EDIT: I am the only person in my team with UK passport. No Germans, but pretty much everywhere else.
Given how low IT salaries outside banking can be in Europe, I'm surprised you can't hire: many people don't want to leave their home country, after all. Is it just a lack of talent?
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
Social media is like the printing press: opening up politics and propaganda to the hoi polloi, accelerating the rate of diffusion and evolution of memes
AI more like the steam engine: steam devalued the human body, AI devalues the human mind forcing us to adopt a completely different model of labour
The more I think about it, the more mind-boggling and unnerving AI becomes. As that article says, consider the trillions of ways the car changed human society. AI is much bigger than the car. Probably bigger than the internet. It is, in a sense, the apotheosis of the internet
Time will tell.
Although we’re due a new revolution anyway.
Internet (95?), social media (05) and mobile phones (07) were starting to look a bit old hat.
And VR is not yet ready for prime time.
AI is probably a bigger revolution than those three combined
As @TimS says, it is the replacement of the human mind the same way industrialisation replaced the human body
The impact on education alone is monumental. Will universities still be around in ten or twenty years? What will they teach? What's the point? AI will do everything better. Humans might as well commit themselves to mindless pleasure
The replacement of aspects of the mind. If AI ever does everything better, then it will be something rather different in kind, not just competence, to what’s around now.
Incidentally, the fear of AI is what sparked Musk’s interest in Neuralink. That is further off (and Musk’s effort is probably not the best), but the merger of mind and computing isn’t a complete fantasy.
Yes. Something like Neuralink is probably the best bet: for humanity to avoid a pretty grim fate: becoming largely irrelevant
I feel for people in education. They will get hit first, and that hit is happening right now. How can you now set writing assignments with ChatGPT available on every phone and computer? And so on
I've still got people in my circle who are blithely unaware of ChatGPT. They don't understand what it is, let alone what it means
On the other hand - I've seen some teachers do "This is the exam question and this is the answer the student gave. Would you grade it for me?" and 10 seconds later it's done, along with the justification and notes.
Swings and roundabouts.
So we will end up with essays written by computers being graded by computers, meanwhile the humans will sit at the side mutely scrolling TikTok on their phones. Probably looking at videos made by computers
It is a dystopian vison, it will probably come true, and it is sad for anyone in education
The feedback loop is an interesting aspect. I know some lecturers who have in the region of 200-400 students in a class and they really get a very cursory exam/coursework check as it is. If students send in marked coursework that has been pre-graded as an 'A' by an AI, then the lecturer uses an AI to check it - will it get better marks than a new, original solution?
Sadly, in 'the real world' a new original solution might also get marked down by a real lecturer skimming it, so maybe it doesn't make a huge difference.
Possibly we are really heading for a 'The Machine Stops' situation down the road. Or, as I've previously referenced 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'. In a dystopian scenario - if we're lucky we will be the Eloi to benevolent AI Morlocks. if we're not then... well. Damn.
It really isn't a great film, and the only fun to be had was Forbin/Corbyn.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
Global services trade, backed up by the presence of as many high skilled people we can import and a friendly regulatory environment. Then restrict low skilled workers to push up wages at the bottom.
At the highest level, that *was* the model. Migration was always higher skilled than the native population.
Not overall surely? The bulk seemed to be people willing to do low paid jobs that the locals wouldn’t, such as care work, hospitality and picking crops. And a tiny minority of high skilled people in Unis and the city.
Yes, overall. Well attested. As for “tiny minority”, that doesn’t really describe the key London service industries like tech etc.
I would think that migration from the EU is higher-skilled than the native population now. In fact, the difference will have increased, if it was higher before (which I doubt).
Just before the pandemic I visited one of Facebook's London offices: about a third of their new hires were from the EU (about a third UK, the remainder others: many Indian). So skilled immigration from the EU continues apace.
There’s no reason to doubt it, it’s an uncontested fact. Possibly, yes, the delta has increased further since Brexit.
I hate to be the "can I have a source" dude, but can I have a source?
As the minor German Bank I work for, they have nearly given up trying to get IT staff in Germany. They are hiring for IT in London, instead.
EDIT: I am the only person in my team with UK passport. No Germans, but pretty much everywhere else.
Given how low IT salaries outside banking can be in Europe, I'm surprised you can't hire: many people don't want to leave their home country, after all. Is it just a lack of talent?
Quality and where people want to be. You can hire any old assehole for not very much, but once you want actual skills, prices rise steeply and choice drops.
Federal prosecutors will urge a judge in a closed-door hearing to hold Donald Trump’s legal team in contempt of court for failing to fully turn over all classified documents in the former president’s possession, a person familiar with the matter said
I'm more interested in VI polling from pollsters with a track record. Sadly at the moment these are mostly being crowded out by the newcomers. Even YouGov seems to be polling much less frequently than usual.
Fair enough - Opinium has been around since 2007. Ipsos-MORI are probably the last of the older pollsters (who remembers Harris, Marplan, ICM?). YouGov are one of the older brigade as well as are Survation but the latter haven't published a poll since early November.
I presume there is a limited base of people and organisations wanting polls commissioned so the large nunber of pollsters are fighting over the same scraps.
I'm more interested in VI polling from pollsters with a track record. Sadly at the moment these are mostly being crowded out by the newcomers. Even YouGov seems to be polling much less frequently than usual.
Fair enough - Opinium has been around since 2007. Ipsos-MORI are probably the last of the older pollsters (who remembers Harris, Marplan, ICM?). YouGov are one of the older brigade as well as are Survation but the latter haven't published a poll since early November.
I presume there is a limited base of people and organisations wanting polls commissioned so the large nunber of pollsters are fighting over the same scraps.
Yeah, of the ones mentioned I'm talking about People Polling and Techne. Also Omnisis and R&W are new since the last election, I believe.
Why? Football is about winning, not being the most sexy footballing side. Brazil looked tired and I doubt they would have got past France anyway.
What's all this "France" business?
They have a massive quarter to get through first.
I’m resigned to our fate.
Well I'm not. 50/50 game. If we play well and get the breaks we're going through. Then a VERY winnable semi, and after that ... well let's just say a prospect even more exciting (!) than GPTr2d2 awaits.
Federal prosecutors will urge a judge in a closed-door hearing to hold Donald Trump’s legal team in contempt of court for failing to fully turn over all classified documents in the former president’s possession, a person familiar with the matter said
One wonders, just how many Top Secret Plus documents, were picked up by Trump staff (down to pool boy and mullet mistress) while they were lying about various part of the Mar-a-Lardo compound.
Heck, an enterprising foreign spy agency wouldn't even need a mole, though of course would NOT preclude them inserting one or more into The Donald's wood work. Without even his knowledge let alone consent or collusion.
Is it true that Suella is going to bring in legislation to stop people staring? I had a table of lunching companions laughing wildly at the idea but now I can't find it anywhere. I hope I haven't been quoting from one of Lyon's fantasy AI projects
One thing that surprises me about the World Cup, is the (apparent, at least to me) lack of mass filling out of bracket predictions, as with NCCA men's basketball "March Madness" tournament.
Note that in 2022 tournament, estimated number of brackets filled out = 36.5 million
One thing that surprises me about the World Cup, is the (apparent, at least to me) lack of mass filling out of bracket predictions, as with NCCA men's basketball "March Madness" tournament.
Note that in 2022 tournament, estimated number of brackets filled out = 36.5 million
Yeah, it's just not a thing. Mostly because of the group stage before the knockout phase, I think.
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
AI/VR is fascinating but how does it map to the big global issues? It's easy in our gilded bubble to forget what these are. So a reminder of the top 5:
Abject poverty Oppression of women Political repression Pollution War
If it doesn't help eradicate these things it's no gamechanger imo.
Category error
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
Fair cop. Where 'narrow' = elevated and startlingly original.
But seriously, all joshing aside, in this case I'm doing Applied rather than Pure. Both of these MOs are necessary in order to harness revolutionary tech for the greater good.
And re "how did electricity impact on things like poverty and female emancipation?"
No, the question doesn't seem 'silly' phrased like that. Quite the opposite. It looks all the more interesting. I'd welcome your views after you've given it some thought.
Please tag me - I'll check in later and take a look.
Electricity freed women from substantial amounts of domestic drudgery, creating the space to pursue careers outside the home in a modern industrial economy.
The washing machine has to be one of the most positively influential applications of new tech ever. Hopefully there'll be many equivalents arising from AI/VR.
But many people and many parts of the world are excluded from technological advancement. This is one reason why so much poverty and inequality persists imo.
Will this next leap forward be an exception to this or will it be same old same old? - excitement in the gilded bubble, shrug of the shoulders outside.
"In the week ending 25 November 2022 (Week 47), 11,483 deaths were registered in England and Wales; 348 of these deathsmentioned'novel coronavirus (COVID-19)'."
Or to be more exact, with SARSCoV2, the SARS variant that everyone's been talking about. The definition of Covid-19 changed from an illness including double diffuse pneumonia in the presence of a SARSCoV2 infection (an illness that was originally called NCIP for Novel Coronavirus-Infected Pneumonia) to just the viral infection.
You should see the looks I get when somebody says they were a bit under the weather for a day because they had Covid and I ask them how long they had the double pneumonia for.
Why? Football is about winning, not being the most sexy footballing side. Brazil looked tired and I doubt they would have got past France anyway.
What's all this "France" business?
They have a massive quarter to get through first.
I’m resigned to our fate.
Well I'm not. 50/50 game. If we play well and get the breaks we're going through. Then a VERY winnable semi, and after that ... well let's just say a prospect even more exciting (!) than GPTr2d2 awaits.
Loving your optimism but I’ve watched England sports teams too long…
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
Right about what? If the question was Brexit will make the country better off in 7 years time, then fine, it’s not. But that wasn’t the question was it? Brexit was about more than just GDP. It was about opting out of the European super state. It was about free trade with the whole world, not just the cartel on our doorstep.
Oh my god, you still believe all of that? Wow, just wow.
Which bit? Opting out of ever closer union? Trading more widely with the world? I missed the adverts which said Brexit is purely about GDP.
BTW I voted remain. But I understand why others voted for Brexit, and I found it an agonising choice. Never had so much mental wrangling over a vote.
The very concept “trading more widely with the world” betrays a fundamental error of logic.
If you are still swallowing that canard, I pity you.
Yes of course it makes more sense to trade freely with Europe. I could be forgiven for thinking we had a free trade agreement in place…
Eh?
Trade with Europe has fallen, and trade beyond Europe doesn’t look very healthy either.
Britain’s economic position was as a highly amenable entrepôt inside Europe, and thus the default choice of traders and investors around the world.
Although I agree that this was insufficient in spreading wealth around the country, the blame for that lies inside Westminster and Treasury.
Brexit killed the golden goose. It is truly difficult to think of viable alternative economic models.
The UK is a big economy in its own right, and the balance of trade in the single market was not in its favour. Thinking that it can prosper as merely a European entrepôt is more of a dead duck than a golden goose.
It astounds me that so many are reluctant to recognise that we were getting closer and closer to insolvency whilst our standard of living declined in the SM. That was mainly our own fault but the idea that continuing on the same course was either viable or sane really is delusional. I completely accept that the necessary changes could have been done within the EU but disruption and poor relative performance was inevitable.
The idea that Britain’s “standard of living declined in the SM” is…
…unique.
We were living well beyond our means with a standard of living we were not earning and falling into debt. Those are the facts. We went from having a significant surplus on foreign investment to an almost unsustainable deficit because so many assets were sold to cover the deficits. If you think that was success you really are delusional.
Brexit has made us collectively poorer by causing big falls in trade and investment. The means we were living beyond have reduced further. How does that help?
'Sir: On the day after the Brexit vote, I met my daughter (a City lawyer) who was absolutely incandescent at my decision. She did not mince her words. Nearly seven years on she was right and I was wrong. There is no defence to Brexit.'
How on earth could we let Northern and Midlands and Essex and Welsh working class oiks get a say on more tightly controlling immigration? All they have done is made my nanny, cleaner and plumber supply more restricted, meant I have to queue an hour longer when going skiing in Klosters and to our summer villa in Tuscany and reduced the number of corporate deals across the EU my firm deals with.
How dare they!!!
Yes, indeed, but if Brexit is fucking up London then it is fucking up UK PLC
London rejected Brexit even in 2016, in part it was 2 fingers to London from the English provinces and Wales, not just to Brussels.
Most Leavers wanted Levelling up and reduced immigration and regained sovereignty, not an even stronger globalist London disconnected from the rest of the country
But we aren't getting reduced immigration. We imported half a million people last year, and Labour will do the same
Meanwhile the dinghy people keep coming
I can understand why many Leavers, rich or poor, are now looking at the state of things and wondering: What was Brexit all FOR?
Personally, I can see the arguments from democracy and sovereignty, but I get why many don't
Apart from controlling immigration from Europe there was nothing of importance we wanted to do that we couldn't have done as EU members. Although there were a couple of big forbidden things we didn't want to do - (i) old style clause 4 socialism and (ii) deregulated cowboy capitalism. Both of these adventures would have been impossible, so required Brexit.
Course if Labour offered (i) or the Tories (ii) in a general election they'd get their arses handed to them because there's no appetite for either vision. The upshot is a bit Donald Rumsfeld: By leaving the EU we can now do things we don't want to do, but we won't since we don't want to, and in return for this privilege it's become harder, in some cases impossible, to do lots of things we do want to do
Democracy in action or just a bit stupid?
Perhaps both?
I can see a pretty convincing argument that Brexit was the right decision taken at the wrong time. You couldn't choose a worse time to seriously upset your trading arrangments than: just before a global plague, a European war, and a worldwide slowdown (or even a slump). So the democratic motivation was justified but it was done at a stupidly bad time
However - I hate to bang on - all this is overshadowed by AI
Over the next five-ten-twenty years this tech is going to utterly transform the world economy, in ways good and bad, and in ways we cannot imagine:
"If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding"
In that enormous context, maybe Brexit does not really matter at all
AI/VR is fascinating but how does it map to the big global issues? It's easy in our gilded bubble to forget what these are. So a reminder of the top 5:
Abject poverty Oppression of women Political repression Pollution War
If it doesn't help eradicate these things it's no gamechanger imo.
Category error
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
Fair cop. Where 'narrow' = elevated and startlingly original.
But seriously, all joshing aside, in this case I'm doing Applied rather than Pure. Both of these MOs are necessary in order to harness revolutionary tech for the greater good.
And re "how did electricity impact on things like poverty and female emancipation?"
No, the question doesn't seem 'silly' phrased like that. Quite the opposite. It looks all the more interesting. I'd welcome your views after you've given it some thought.
Please tag me - I'll check in later and take a look.
Electricity freed women from substantial amounts of domestic drudgery, creating the space to pursue careers outside the home in a modern industrial economy.
The washing machine has to be one of the most positively influential applications of new tech ever. Hopefully there'll be many equivalents arising from AI/VR.
But many people and many parts of the world are excluded from technological advancement. This is one reason why so much poverty and inequality persists imo.
Will this next leap forward be an exception to this or will it be same old same old? - excitement in the gilded bubble, shrug of the shoulders outside.
It's all fun and games till the washing machine becomes essentially sentient.
I'm sort of imagining something like the uber cheery toaster from Red Dwarf.
Win win. Can't lose here cos I support any team with Scots heritage and there's one in each side.
I don't give a f*** for spectator sport, but I can usually work out who the England team is playing against because my friend in Scotland tells me what flag his f***witted neighbour has put up in his front garden.
One thing that surprises me about the World Cup, is the (apparent, at least to me) lack of mass filling out of bracket predictions, as with NCCA men's basketball "March Madness" tournament.
Note that in 2022 tournament, estimated number of brackets filled out = 36.5 million
Comments
Wanna defend THAT?
BTW, Biden and US government, and USA as whole, have direct stake in Trussterfuck due to implications for global economy AND the potential for IMF bailout or something like it.
You have, I will say again, a frankly unique understanding of trade economics.
Swings and roundabouts.
This is your narrow mind at work again
What were the biggest issues in the late Victorian world? Probably quite similar to the five you name now, minus pollution
How did the advent of electricity affect poverty, the oppression of women, or "war"? See: it's a silly question. You're not thinking about it right
They have a massive quarter to get through first.
That said, and on reflection, climate change might be the one case where AI will obviously help. A megabrain will think of solutions mere humans cannot
Just before the pandemic I visited one of Facebook's London offices: about a third of their new hires were from the EU (about a third UK, the remainder others: many Indian). So skilled immigration from the EU continues apace.
It is a dystopian vison, it will probably come true, and it is sad for anyone in education
You have a static model in your head, in which a fixed slice of pie gets traded around the world.
You miss the effects of endogenous innovation and wealth creation. In other words, Britain keeps making new pies and indeed new types of pie.
I happen to agree that Britain’s goods deficit was too large, but my main issue is/was that it reflected a lack of productivity in the traditional manufacturing regions.
Finally, Britain’s trade deficit seems to have increased significantly since leaving the single market.
"Have no doubt: opening a coalmine in Cumbria is a climate crime against humanity".
What a loony!
If she meant this stuff she'd be verging on the psychotic. Perhaps she does mean it. Or perhaps she is such a politician that the difference between meaning something and not meaning it doesn't apply. But surely she has heard of slavery, concentration camps, dropping atom bombs, things like that?
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/1-3bn-swansea-bay-tidal-lagoon-officially-sunk-as-developer-loses-planning-appeal-07-12-2022/
Shit.
Bloomberg TV
@BloombergTV
·
2h
Official
ChatGPT is a development on par with the printing press, electricity and even the wheel and fire, says former US Treasury Secretary @LHSummers
@DavidWestin has more on “Wall Street Week,” airing Fridays at 6 pm ET https://trib.al/CcA6BmS
https://twitter.com/JohannRoduit/status/1601283229688139777?s=20&t=1KQVXSMyldgUiaMvKTz0UA
It's as big as The Invention of the Wheel. Or the Harnessing of Fire
https://www.statista.com/statistics/284745/balance-of-trade-uk/
But seriously, all joshing aside, in this case I'm doing Applied rather than Pure. Both of these MOs are necessary in order to harness revolutionary tech for the greater good.
And re "how did electricity impact on things like poverty and female emancipation?"
No, the question doesn't seem 'silly' phrased like that. Quite the opposite. It looks all the more interesting. I'd welcome your views after you've given it some thought.
Please tag me - I'll check in later and take a look.
Now that really would be a category error. Those who control the questions control the answers, or they control the acceptable field in which answers can be given.
The climate has always changed. Wanting to stop it changing is Frankensteinian. The mobilisation fits extremely well in the fascist dynamic that's well underway now, and picking up pace, in all countries.
https://www.livescience.com/oldest-narrative-scene-neolithic-turkey
This is sanliurfa, gobekli tepe stuff.
A hospital trust has apologised to a woman for failing to admit a surgeon had been responsible for a massive haemorrhage that almost killed her after a Caesarean section.
For seven years, East Kent Hospitals Trust maintained the size of Louise Dempster's baby was to blame.
"It was just continuous lies," the 34-year-old told BBC News.
East Kent Hospitals chief executive Tracy Fletcher promised "to ensure lessons are learned".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63920920
Though doubt is anyone gives a blind fiddler's final farewell feck about ANYTHING she's got to say. Except maybe forTMZ coverage of her memoirs!
Or just give low marks to drivel.
Sadly, in 'the real world' a new original solution might also get marked down by a real lecturer skimming it, so maybe it doesn't make a huge difference.
Possibly we are really heading for a 'The Machine Stops' situation down the road. Or, as I've previously referenced 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'. In a dystopian scenario - if we're lucky we will be the Eloi to benevolent AI Morlocks. if we're not then... well. Damn.
After a bit of a frank discussion, they had another go and found the claret leak.
One or two on the Conservative side getting excited about a couple of polls but it's not that simple.
Savanta ComRes is arguably the best poll for the Conservatives for some time with just an 11-point Labour lead (42-31) - the fieldwork was done 2-4 December so perhaps a little out of date. The headline figure is all those likely to vote and expressing a party preference.
Among the sub-samples, the 65+ age group has a 47-26 Conservative lead - England has Labour ahead 45-34 (a 12% swing Con-Lab) while London has a 54-31 Labour lead.
In the other corners, Techne has Labour 48%, Conservative 27%. In their sub-samples, Labour leads 45-34 among those 65 or over. 22% of those who voted Conservative would now vote Labour. Sampling on Wednesday.
Finally, we have People Polling who have Labour on 47%, Conservatives on 20% - unfortunately, no data tables I can see. Sampling Wednesday and yesterday.
There you are, Labour 42-48%, Conservatives 20-31%. That's an enormous variation and while all polling is wrong, some of this is very wrong indeed. As so often with life, something for everyone and more polls are needed...
Even yesterday's local by-elections the veritable curate's egg. I'm not sure a Conservative gain in South Holland & The Deepings (where John Hayes clings on by his fingertips and a 31,000 majority) means much though the win in Dumfries & Galloway of more significance. Gains also for Labour and the LDs in areas of present and former strength.
EDIT: I am the only person in my team with UK passport. No Germans, but pretty much everywhere else.
Admissions UP
MV Beds FLATISH so far
Deaths DWON
Federal prosecutors will urge a judge in a closed-door hearing to hold Donald Trump’s legal team in contempt of court for failing to fully turn over all classified documents in the former president’s possession, a person familiar with the matter said
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-to-urge-judge-to-hold-trump-team-in-contempt-over-classified-documents-11670611486?mod=e2tw
I presume there is a limited base of people and organisations wanting polls commissioned so the large nunber of pollsters are fighting over the same scraps.
70m/70years/365days - that's 2.5k.
It’ll be better still when England knock Portugal out in the semi to set up a final against Argentina.
Heck, an enterprising foreign spy agency wouldn't even need a mole, though of course would NOT preclude them inserting one or more into The Donald's wood work. Without even his knowledge let alone consent or collusion.
Note that in 2022 tournament, estimated number of brackets filled out = 36.5 million
This massively reduces the seriousness of the disease.
Or fewer?
But many people and many parts of the world are excluded from technological advancement. This is one reason why so much poverty and inequality persists imo.
Will this next leap forward be an exception to this or will it be same old same old? - excitement in the gilded bubble, shrug of the shoulders outside.
Three of us resigned from Twitter’s Trust & Safety Council today: @eirliani @podesta_lesley and me.
https://twitter.com/annecollier/status/1600889250761027585
@elonmusk
It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601275244710621184
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending25november2022
"In the week ending 25 November 2022 (Week 47), 11,483 deaths were registered in England and Wales; 348 of these deaths mentioned 'novel coronavirus (COVID-19)'."
Or to be more exact, with SARSCoV2, the SARS variant that everyone's been talking about. The definition of Covid-19 changed from an illness including double diffuse pneumonia in the presence of a SARSCoV2 infection (an illness that was originally called NCIP for Novel Coronavirus-Infected Pneumonia) to just the viral infection.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-020-0372-4
You should see the looks I get when somebody says they were a bit under the weather for a day because they had Covid and I ask them how long they had the double pneumonia for.
Of course, the only reason people get this wrong is that less and fewer have the same antonym.
I really don't understand your logic.
But yes, dramatically different to two years ago right now.
I'm sort of imagining something like the uber cheery toaster from Red Dwarf.
Edit: It's really not so hard to get things right.